Customer Reviews

Coming Up for Air (Library Edition)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Oddly, the pocket book cover quotes the NYT that this book is a 'charming ... minor masterpiece'. It took me a while to realize that this is exactly the case.
The novel is set in London in 1938, with WW2 looming. It was Orwell's first novel after risking his life in Catalonia. It was his last novel before Animal Farm. He still had ambitions to play in James Joyce's league as a novelist. He greatly admired Ulysses. In a way, his George Fatty Bowling is Orwell's Leo Bloom in London. But not quite. As charming as the novel is, it is also the final proof that Orwell was not the great novelist that he would have wished to be. He was a great essayist. Even his two later masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984, essentially demonstrate that he was in first place an essayist and a man with a message.
Coming up for Air is the monologue of a middle aged middle class man who takes a break from his oppressive family and job life. He is the antisocial character who paints his front door green, where all others are blue. He escapes for an outing and 'comes up for air'.
The story is told by the hero in an odd mixture of stream of consciousness and autobiography. One might say, Orwell told parts of his own life story. And that is the crux of the matter: he remains the intellectual who sympathizes with the proles and despises the upward ambitions of the lower middle classes.
The book is a failure insofar as Orwell never manages to let Bowling speak. Bowling is just a pretext for Orwell's own words.
The book is not a failure, because what Orwell has to tell us of England between 1893 and 1938 is well worth knowing. Bowling should be an uninteresting man, by all criteria, but Orwell fails to let him bore us.

Orwell may be perpetuating the ultimate fraud here. His gift as a reporter may just be the talent he needed to...pawn off his own life as fiction.

This fabulous novel documents the mid-life crisis of an aging and bloated insurance salesman who vaguely remembers a time when people weren't scared of war and believed that most of life's more visible elements would endure without end.

This isn't a comming of age story, its more of a passing of an age story. The miracle here is the incredible emotion the reader feels as "Tubby" recalls his youth and the passing of his parents...events he barely aknowledged as they happened...and while they don't quite haunt him now, he wonders how he lost them.

Set in pre-war (WWII) England, the spectre of Hitler and Stalin always loom large in the background as our hero decides to go after the fishing hole he never got back to 20 years ago.

It probably doesn't matter whether or not the fishing hole is still there, only that we realized that it needed to be found again.

Like all Orwell, as touching and emotional as this effort is, it is never dire or heavy. This is a quick and rewarding read, and, I am guessing, more autobiographical than the author would have us believe.

It is a shame that Orwell is known these days only for the monumental works high-school students are forced to read. As unlikely as it seems, the man who penned the brutal "1984" has also written a wonderful collection of light reflections that should not go unread. Consider "Burmese Days" and "A Clergy Man's Daughter" as well.

As seasoned readers know, your response to any work is a combination of its intrinsic merit and timing. Maybe this just wasn't the right time to read this novel. Maybe I'll come back at some future time to revisit this assessment.

It simply did not register with me as did Orwell's other, non-political fiction, including the charming Keep The Aspidistra Flying. Part of it, I believe, arises from the fact that the novel is written in the first-person, which can be limiting in that it restricts us to the narrator's vocabulary and deprives us of Orwell's magnificent facility with langauge.

Now, as to the novel's merits. George "Fatty" Bowles, who, having won 17 pounds on a horse race, decides to use his winnings to escape and reflect upon his life for a week -- or, as he puts it, "to come up for air" -- is an engaging everyman, a person in whom all we old, ossified married types see ourself, and he captures perfectly the horrible nexus between memory and desire that a man's fifth decade often is. As he visits the town of his birth to witness how time has effaced its charm, we are with him all the way. His reflection on the approaching war is both moving and memorable. Because the first world war did not happen on our shores, it's hard for us to imagine its impact on the English imagination as that nation anticipated a reprise of that horrific, generation-destroying event. Orwell captures this dreadful anticipation very convincingly.

Finally, there's this: among all the people who have ever struggled for the poor and the middle-class, Orwell seems to have struggled more earnestly, yet to have been exempt from the tendency to idealize the people he was trying to help. Bowles is no one's ideal; he's just pretty much everyone's reality. He is convincingly middle-classed.

It is, as all this indicates, a fine novel. It simply doesn't represent the author at the height of his ability.

Imagine Winston Smith in 1938. 1984 is a long way off yet. But he can see it coming, can taste it in the putrid plastic sausages and flavourless, fetid factory beer. The people with the jackboots - in Germany, in Russia, in England, everywhere - will soon have their hammers out, smashing faces, smashing ideas, smashing a way of life. But it's not Winston Smith, it's George Bowling. And before the world comes crashing down around his ears, he tries to find back that part of his life when it was always summer, when there wasn't a care in the world, when there was just bright hope, and fishing, and endless lazy days. Of course, it wasn't there anymore. The men with the jackboots and hammers had been preceded by the men with bulldozers and pre-packaged, pre-digested pork pies. And maybe that world had never existed in the first place. But the journey we take with George Bowlings, back and forth between his childhood and the 1984 that waits round the corner, between his suburban family prison and his childhood home, is perhaps the most involving, unsettling and mesmerising Orwell has ever taken us on. I love Animal Farm and 1984. Coming Up For Air is better.

Most people know George Orwell by two of his later works - 1984 and ANIMAL FARM. What they don't necessarily know is that, in addition to the thousands of pages of reportage, journalism and essays he also produced in his all-too-brief career, he also penned six other books, including four novels and an autobiographical study of poverty (DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON) which reads better than 90% of the novels ever written. Nevertheless, Orwell is not really thought of as a novelist, but rather as a fiery political thinker who occasionally used fiction to make his points.

COMING UP FOR AIR is as good an argument for Orwell as a novelist as can be made without referencing his masterwork, 1984. Written during the "gathering storm" period of the mid-late 1930s, it reflects not only Orwell's anxiety, dread and disgust in regards to where the world was heading, but captures as well a keen sense of nostalgia for the world as it was during his own childhood - a world without secret police, bombing planes or political fanaticism. A world where it was still possible to believe that everything turned out all right in the end.

COMING UP FOR AIR is the self-told story of George "Fatty" Bowling, a wholly ordinary, lower middle-class salesman who lives in the "inner-outer" suburbs of London. Bowling is "full figured" (meaning fat), wears false teeth, has a nagging wife and two annoying kids, and lives in a generic rowhouse he'll never pay off. He's vulgar, cynical and tactless, but just perceptive enough to be capable of epiphany. One day, wandering down a London street, he's reminded of something from his childhood at the beginning of the 20th century, which he spent in a little farming town called Lower Binfield. Suddenly overcome with nostalgia, a feeling that the world around him is soon going to be smashed to pieces by war and political upheaval, and finally by the fact that his family is suffocating him, George decides to fake a business trip and spend a week in the placid countryside where he grew up - in essence, to crawl back into the womb. But what will the womb look like after the passage of twenty-odd years? Will it still provide comfort, or just reinforce his feelings that the world is not only changing out of recognition, but for the worse?

Like all Orwell's novels, COMING UP FOR AIR is at heart a political book, at once an attack on modern society and a warning that nostalgia for the past won't bring it back.
Masquerading as a "you can't go home again" sermon, the novel is actually about the brutal contrast between the modern world in which Bailey lives (which he hates), and the more pastoral, innocent time of his youth. Although Bailey repeatedly points out the harshness of life in rural England in those sleepy years before WWI, the feeling he himself returns to over and over again is a kind of clear-eyed sentimentality, an understanding that while conditions were physically tougher, people were actually much more secure mentally and emotionally, because the world they lived in was stable and not haunted by fear - of governmental tyranny, and of a greed-crazed corporate Kultur that would systematically disenfranchise and ruin independent business owners. Orwell shows impressive, perhaps even masterly skill at recreating the atmosphere of rural England in 1905, which in Bailey's mind is always summer - insects humming, a golden haze hanging over the fields, fish jumping in the farmer's ponds. The distinction between it and modern London, where everything is cold, chromed-over and streamlined, "even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you" is startling, and shows that Orwell, so often viewed as a mean-spirited misanthrope in public-spirited clothing, was capable of a very human longing for simpler times.

perfection is this: thinking about writing an amazon book review and simultaneously coming across a line that sums up a book nearly perfectly (see title).

orwell is magical when it comes to sliding down the slippery slope with passion, terror and vigor. this book is quite different. it is slow and melodic...the tone is cozy and nostalgic with random bits of sardonic bitterness...and hardly is there a theme, but perhaps this: "everything will always be the same and everything is constantly changing."

george bowling is a middle-aged suburban wash up who hates life, lightly reminisces about his time during world war i and the beauty and purity of his long forgotten childhood. the story takes place at the onset of wwii and george decides to revisit the place where he grew up in order to "come up for air" and remember what the good life used to be.

throughout the book, he teeters between optimism and dark despair...hatred and whimsical glory...esteem and self loathing...etc. the book is entertaining with fantastic imagery and offers a single harrowing scene which might bring anyone who has not experienced the terror of war to tears. read this and you are guaranteed to laugh, smile, and get bored...but all worth it.

bravo, orwell. yet again.

Coming Up for Air begins with one of the most disarming and quintessentially English sentences in all
of literature :

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

The speaker is George "Fatty" Bowling, an insurance salesman, with a wife he does not love and two
children he finds annoying. The idea is to take the seventeen pounds he almost accidentally won on a
horse race and to go visit Lower Binfield, the village in which he grew up and which holds so many
happy memories of youth and of a simpler England. The story is set in 1938, the War approaching,
and George's thoughts continually drift back to the time before WWI :

1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come
again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of
not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you've either had and don't need to be
told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the chance to learn.

And so he decides to try and recapture that scene of his youth :

[I]t wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get my nerve back before the bad
times begin. Because does anyone who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time
coming ? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps
a slump--no knowing, except that it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going
downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no knowing. And you can't face that kind of thing
unless you've got the right feeling inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these
twenty years since the war. It's a kind of vital juice that we've squirted away until there's nothing
left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses,
bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the
marrow out to be.

I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had
done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air!

But of course the village and the life he recalls are long since gone.

Orwell writes beautifully about the world that Lower Binfield represented and with great disdain of
the England that George currently occupies. But his most devastating intuitions concern the world to
come. In the book's signal moment, George has gone to a Left Book Club meeting with his wife to
hear an anti-Fascist speaker. As the speaker drones on :

I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my
eyes for a moment. The effect was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could
only hear his voice.

It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing,
really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same
thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and
over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on
your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside
his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I
was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.

I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about.
What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate.
Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he's seeing is something quite
different. It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of
course. I know that's what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I
was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a
face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That's
what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's
all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his
voice.

There's much here that foreshadows 1984, from the idea of an organized event called a "hate" to the
image of the future consisting of smashing peoples' faces--recall the chilling line : "If you want a
picture of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face--forever."

The term "Orwellian" is thrown about fairly freely, to the point where it may have no fixed meaning.
If anything, folks probably consider it to refer to the concept of "Big Brother" or some authoritarian
force spying on us or oppressing us. But the truly Orwellian moments occur not so much when these
external forces are brought to bear, but when we become their accomplices : when Winston Smith
denounces Julia, when the other animals help enforce the pigs rules at Animal Farm, and here, when
the theoretically benign anti-Fascist becomes a figure of terror himself. This is Orwell's great insight,
hard earned in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War, that in the modern political world, where mere
political differences yield to hatred of the other, even those with the best intentions become monstrous,
their hatreds warping them until they are capable of horrific acts.

Without taking anything away from Animal Farm or 1984, Coming Up for Air is perhaps an even
more impressive novel. First of all, it is a realist fiction--with all the restrictions which that
entails--not a fantasy. Second, where the other two books have the advantage of hindsight, Coming Up
for Air is predictive. It correctly forecasts a world where even the Allies, the putative "good guys,"
would find themselves shipping citizens to concentration camps, fire bombing cities and finally
resorting to nuclear weapons. Smash! Smash! Smash! It is a great book.

GRADE : A+

A fat middle-aged salesman goes back to his childhood home to fend off a rising anxiety in prewar Europe, and the result is tragicomedy.

One of the best novels I have ever read. Orwell was never better at creating a mood, an atmosphere, a state of mind, than in this book. It is engaging, witty, and powerful. I'm not sure I can say exactly what point Orwell (as opposed to the protagonist) was trying to make in this book, but I find a lot of resonance between his concerns in 1938 with a coming war and mine today. Not just a concern with a war, but a fear of the permanent, sweeping changes that war will bring with it.

Combine this with "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" and "Down and Out in Paris and London" and you get a very good look into Orwell's mind, and you can see the architecture behind his better-known books, "1984" and "Animal Farm." But both of those books, however great they are in their own way, are both curiously cold and impersonal. Here, we have Orwell at his warmest and most human.

If things made any sense, this is the kind of book that every teenager would read, the way they read (or at least used to read) Vonnegut and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger.

In the context of 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty Four', it's almost impossible to approach 'Coming Up For Air' from anything other than a political viewpoint. Since the mid 30's, Orwell had regarded war with Hitler as inevitable. He was also highly disenchanted with the capitalist Britain of the day, and like a true Socialist he anticipated that the coming war would bring massive social reorganisation, for better or worse. So 'Coming Up For Air' is the calm before the storm. It is Orwell (through the narrator) taking a last longing look at the Britain of his childhood, a world that was already vanishing in 1939, and was soon expected to be gone for good.

At its heart, 'Coming Up For Air' is a part-autobiography, part-reflection of the book's narrator, George Bowling. In some ways, Bowling is the exact opposite of Gordon Comstock from Orwell's previous book 'Keep The Aspidistra Flying'; Bowling has surrendered to the Money God and lives a boring and predictable middle-class existence. A chance encounter leads Bowling to reminisce in detail about his childhood, longing to return to a time he regards as simpler and more peaceful. Eventually, he attempts to reconnect with his past by returning home, only to find that everything has changed. The overwhelming impression is that there's no place for whimsical nostalgia in the modern world. Or maybe this childhood world wasn't really as idyllic as Bowling likes to remember?

The book is more light-hearted than some of Orwell's novels, and the political themes are nowhere near as prominent as his later works. However, the social commentary does provide some context for Bowling's thoughts and actions; rather than just hankering for the "Good Old Days", the book implies that Bowling's childhood really was the Good Old Days compared to the war-torn, frenetic 1930's. And while the book is very much of its time, its message is just as relevant 70 years later. Every generation believes life was simpler, smarter and more compassionaite in the days of their childhood; today's elderly probably dream of a time when they'd never heard of terrorism, new technologies, climate change, or globalisation. Above all, the book is a fascinating insight into the two halves of Orwell himself. He was a firm believer in Socialism, but he was also very English. So while he always worked toward social change and progress, I think part of him was dismayed to see the England of old slowly disappear.

While not as strong or political as Orwell's two classic works, in its own way 'Coming Up For Air' is just as relevant. I definitely recommend that Orwell fans seek this one out.

Coming up for Air is a refreshing look at life through the eyes of an ordinary, overweight middle-aged man. I wanted to comment on how the book made me think about how we should cherish those little things in life that we take for granted, it is an old message but this book made me realize it again. The plot is plain, no suspense or excitement whatsover, what the book does however is take you back to your own childhood and helps you think about those things that were important to you then.

There are many other issues that the book touches on, the escapism of some, the inevitability of change, the prison that is marriage etc...

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read something light and sentimental.